I've been playing No Man's Sky on PS4 since launch day and I'm still hooked, not sure how many hours I have put in so far. From the reports I have seen the PC version is less stable.
It is a bit of a grind but I'm still enjoying the amazing landscapes and spotting shorelines of lakes that look like Mandelbrot sets, but I'm a bit of fractal geek. I'm only on my second system and I'm considering going back to my starting system as I hardly touched it in terms of exploration. I have maxed out the journey milestones for "on-foot exploration", "alien colonist encounters" and "words collected" (results in babelfish rank which is nice). I have learned 342 words, most of which are Gek and I am now able to follow most Gek conversations with still a few missing words.
The initial small number of inventory slots are a bit of a pain but now that I have found a few drop pods to get extra exosuit slots and got a better ship with more slots it is better. One of the things I discovered was that ship inventory slots can hold twice the number of stackable elements (Iron, Plutonium, etc) as the exosuit slots, 500 instead of 250.
With regard to @DABhand's points:
I have been told once I was being scanned by pirates (i think) but haven't encountered any yet, just a sentinel ship that blew me up
Although I have been sticking to mainly planetary exploration so far.
I encountered a few different creatures on my start planet but my current system is a bit sparse when it comes to fauna. When you talk about alien pig face are you referring to an alien you interact with or creatures found roaming the planet? The aliens you interact with are a bit samey, but as they aren't the randomly generated ones they will be. I've only dealt with the Gek and the Vy'keen so far.
In only my second system I have come across planets discovered by another player, but not any locations within those planets yet. AFAIK all the ships you see docking at stations are piloted by NPCs that you can interact with, not other players, so that would explain why they haven't discovered anything nearby. If you interact with them you can buy/sell goods or buy their ship if they have a better one and you have enough credits. That is how I got my third ship after finding my second ship at a crash site and patching it up.
As for cost I used Tesco clubcard points to pre order it during their last double up promotion so it only cost me £24 in points and then I got a £2 refund on my credit card as they reduced the price at launch 
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Scott
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